by Martina Billings-McAtee, RN

Created on: December 04, 2009

The Motorola Droid has stormed onto the market just in time for Christmas. With its eye catching commercials and sleek new look it has everybody's full attention. Besides having the newest Google operating system Android 2.0, the Droid boasts a wider screen, better resolution and a cool new feature that turns the phone into a GPS navigation system.

The first thing one can't help but notice about the Droid is its screen, it is a 3.7 inch screen with an 854 by 480 pixel display. This is a vast difference to the iPhone's 3.5 inch, 480-by-320 pixel offering. The larger screen means less scrolling up and down while using the phone, which is an experience that gets old ten minutes after purchasing the iPhone.

The second feature that blows the iPhone out of the water is the ability to run multiple apps at one time. It has long frustrated iPhone users, that in order to open one app you had to close another. Not so with the Droid, this phone allows you to run up to six applications at one time.

Another cool feature of the Droid is its voice feature. With a tap of a single button you can search google for anything on the internet or on your phone all with voice commands and it will give you the option of calling or mapping any business or residential number.

While the above features are great, it is this GPS navigations function that really causes the Droid to stand out in the smart phone market. In conjunction with Google maps, Droid users now have the opportunity to pop their phone into a docking station in their vehicle and use it like a navigation system. This is a handy feature that it will be hard for the iphone to compete with. There is also a docking station that allows you to use your Droid as an alarm clock but that feature doesn't seem nearly as appealing to a mass audience as the GPS.

The one place that iphone does completely outshine the Droid, however is in apps. iPhone has apps in the hundreds of thousands which leaves the newly created Android 2.0 apps in the dust with their ten thousand apps. However, as the Droid's popularity increases as well as new Android 2.0 phones are released the amount of apps is sure to increase so it hardly seems enough to deter one from purchasing the phone.

It is really hard to do a side by side comparison with the phone without feeling a bit sorry for iPhone users. Droid seems to outshine the iPhone in almost every feature. It will be interesting to see how Apple responds and what smart phone companies in general will create in order to compete with Motorola's newest powerhouse.

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